The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream
The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the CrimeCon Clue Award for True Crime Book of the Year
“When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most puzzling murder investigations. Incredibly, at the time the words of the world’s most famous fictional detective appeared in print in the Strand Magazine, a real-life Canadian doctor was stalking and murdering women in London’s downtrodden Lambeth neighbourhood. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream had been a suspect in the deaths of two women in Canada, and had killed as many as four people in Chicago before he arrived in London in 1891 and began using pills laced with strychnine to kill prostitutes. The Lambeth Poisoner, as he was dubbed in the press, became one of the most prolific serial killers in history.
In this fascinating book, Dean Jobb reveals how bungled investigations, corrupt officials and failed prosecutions allowed Cream to evade detection or freed him to kill, again and again. The first complete account of Dr. Cream’s crimes and his many victims explores how the stifling morality and hypocrisy of the Victorian era allowed this monster to poison vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help. It offers an inside account of Scotland Yard’s desperate search for a killer as brazen and efficient as Jack the Ripper.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jobb (Empire of Deception) provides the definitive account of serial poisoner Thomas Neill Cream in this enthralling real-life thriller. Born in Scotland in 1850, Cream moved with his family to Montreal, Canada, where he earned his medical degree at McGill University. He became a respected member of his London, Ontario, community, while leading a murderous double life. After the body of a woman with whom Cream was alleged to have had an affair was found near his office in 1879, a victim of chloroform poisoning, he became a suspect and fled to the U.S. In Chicago, he became a person of interest in several deaths and was convicted in 1881 of poisoning a patient. When his life sentence was commuted in 1891, Cream immigrated to England, where his murder of several prostitutes in London with strychnine led to his arrest and execution in 1892. (It was also mooted that he could have been Jack the Ripper, though he was in prison in Illinois at the time of the Ripper killings.) Jobb nicely places this grim story in context, as Cream's London trial created a precedent for the admission of similar uncharged crimes as evidence and exposed massive Scotland Yard failures that left Cream free to kill more people until he was finally apprehended. Jobb's extensive research pays off in a true-crime masterpiece that will easily sit alongside The Devil in the White City.
